The last pass changed row internals and left the screen architecture
alone, and the screen architecture is what makes the kit look like the
kit. Reported back as "looks exactly the same and nothing like the
sketch", which was accurate.
Four cards -- a presence picker, a paragraph about what stories are,
contacts, groups -- each on its own white surface with a heading. The
kit's messages screen is one flat list under a title, a search box and
a strip of stories. No amount of restyling the rows inside those cards
was going to get there; the cards were the thing.
🔴 The type scale was the other half, and it was invisible from inside
a single screen. Material 3's defaults are considerably larger than the
kit's, so a section heading rendered at 24sp where the kit says 16 and
every screen inherited it. Set once in the theme, which fixes screens
nobody has touched.
Stories was a heading, a Post button, and -- with nothing posted, which
is the normal state -- three lines of prose explaining what a story is.
Prose where the design has a row of circles is the loudest possible
signal that this is not the same app. It is a strip of faces now, with
the add-circle always first so there is always somewhere to tap.
The tab bar is the kit's floating pill rather than a row of text
buttons; it is the most recognisable single element in the design.
Group rows carry the same avatar and the same 72dp pitch as contact
rows, so the two read as one list rather than two that follow each
other. The presence picker moved to Account, where the kit would put
it, instead of being dropped with the card it lived in.
The buddy list is plain rows in the page's own scroll now. It was a
lazy list bounded at 320dp -- a small scrolling window inside a
scrolling page, which is exactly what a flat list is not. The bound
existed because a lazy list in a scrolling Column is measured with
infinite height and crashes; rendering rows directly sidesteps that.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
